And the data keeps piling on.

Two years ago, I shared the data that pop is simply something we shouldn’t include in our- and especially our kids’ diets.  Yes, I know- up until two decades ago, I was imbibing gallons of pop each and every day. (At least 6 liters of Diet Coke and about 24 ounces of Chocolate Cherry pop.) But, I stopped- cold turkey. (So should you!)

Dr. Neil Murphy (International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France) headed up this new multi-national big data analysis. (I would list all the co-authors, but there are way too many (as you can see from the below diagram.)

The data base was the EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) system coalescing the data from  10 European nations. With 521330 potential subjects, the researchers culled the data for those who were included in the database from 1 January 1992 through 31 December 2000. Any subject that already was diagnosed with cancer, cardiac disease, or diabetes was deliberately excluded from their analysis. (This cut the maximum universe to 451743 subjects- both men and women from Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden [that’s 10 countries] in Europe. The mean age was 50.8 and 71.1% were female.)

Now, my primary bitch with the paper was the cutoffs they used. The two cohorts were if one drank two or more glasses of pop a day or less than one glass a month. That’s a wide chasm. But, I do admit that chasm spoke volumes.

If someone were in the twice a day (or more) habit, they were toast. Is that clear enough? And, it’s immaterial whether one drank diet pop or the fully sweetened versions.

So, if your “poison” is diet drinks, then your prognosis was death via circulatory diseases. And, if you elected the sugar-laden pop, then you can look forward to death via digestive diseases (liver, appendix, pancreas, and/or intestines).

My secondary bitch is one that is far harder for those culling big data to control. Those who consumed the higher quantities of pop were also current tobacco smokers. (They also had higher BMI- body mass indices- than the other cohorts.) The researchers attempted to “clean up’ the data- looking for associations in smokers and non-smokers, between lean and obese subjects. And, to the best of their knowledge, they believe their results were not overly biased because of smoking habits or excess BMI. (However, the issue of less healthy lifestyles for those who imbibe diet pop cannot be ruled out completely as a factor in their deaths.)

This study amplifies those two studies that I discussed in 2016. There, one discerned the association with diabetes and high blood sugar took only ONE can of sweetened pop a day. Six cans a week were almost guaranteed to find the subject to be insulin-resistant. The other study I discussed covered diet pop- sweetened by aspartame. Those folks were subject to digestive disease and were pre-diabetic. (Aspartame interferes with the activities of out gut microbiota.)

There was some good news from Dr. Murphy’s European subject research, though. This research group spends a lot of time studying cancers- and they found no association between higher pop consumption and deaths from cancer. Oh- and neither was Alzheimer’s incidence a direct result of pop consumption.

Take your mental victories where you can.

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